brief surface from the novella pit

Eek, yes, I have vanished from the blog this month, but for a good cause! I’ve had a book idea noodling around since 2015, and every time I’m ready to start a new project I dust it off, get 30 pages in, and decide it isn’t substantial enough for a fantasy novel.

And then I realized: nov…ella??

So I’m finally doing it! I’m drafting this damn thing come hell or high water (lol I’m in Southern California it’s not gonna be the latter) and then I am going to let the rough draft sit for a while so I can tackle my real goal: THE TWENTY-NINETEEN BOOK.

And yeah, it’s deeefinitely going to need to sit for a while, because I’ve got four years’ worth of hodgepodge ideas crammed into this draft. And YET AGAIN, I have attempted to write a large story that transformed before my eyes into a small, personal story. Will it ever find a home? I’m not sure. But it’ll be out of my head, and that’s worth a couple months of work.

I’m 20,000 words in, with probably about 5,000 to go! It’s really happening this time! And this is a weird length to work in, I’m not gonna lie. It’s feels like a too-long short story, or a too-short book, my opinion flip-flops every day and I can’t tell if I’m being verbose or shallow or what.

By this time next month, I’ll be knee-deep in my comfort zone: extensive worldbuilding for a 100K word book that will never touch on most of that world!